Malta-based Binance, a leading cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume has discontinued staking rewards for Stellar tokens XLM. This follows the recent upgrade by Stellar to version 12 which effectively got rid of the inflation program which Binance was relying on to earn rewards on its staked coins.
As such, depositors of XLM on the Binance platform will no longer earn any staking rewards on their tokens starting from Tuesday, October 29th. Stellar completed the upgrade on Monday October 28th. In a notification on Tuesday, Binance wrote that it will:
“distribute staking rewards earned from Stellar earned up until the time of the upgrade, which occurred at 2019/10/28 4:00 PM (UTC). Users will still receive the October XLM distribution in the first 5 days of November. Moving forward, users will no longer receive any Stellar rewards.”
Binance introduced the staking program in mid-2019 and so far has added support for at least 10 assets. Now that Stellar will no longer be supported, Binance says that the other support coins and tokens, totaling 11 will continue.
This means that for the Stellar stakers who are still interested in earning rewards for their staked coins, they will have to exchange their XLM coins for any of the other supported coins including NEO, ONT, VEN, KMD, ALGO, QTUM, STRAT, FETCH, ONE, ERD, and TRX.
The staking rewards program by Binance works similar to a staking pool. Binance users deposit their coins into their accounts and permit Binance to include them in the exchange’s staking pool.
Only coins using Proof of Stake as a consensus mechanism are supported for staking. Once the rewards period is achieved, Binance distributes any proceeds that are rewarded to Binance. Each staker in the platform gets their proportionate share of the rewards. The program is appealing because it allows hodlers – those who have large amounts of funds stored – to earn extra funds on their coins that would have otherwise remained unused.
In other news, Binance announced through its Twitter handle on Tuesday that it has completed work on its Android version application that will be used to trade cryptocurrency futures on its platform.
The application is expected to be listed on the Google Play store any time before the end of the week but for Binance users eager to have the application, the exchange provided a downloadable APK on their website. According to the announcement, the iOS version is in active development to be launched at a later date.
